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The didactics of translation and interpreting Testing and assessment criteria and methods Can subjectivity be avoided in translation evaluation? Winibert Segers & Hendrik J Kockaert, KU Leuven Camiel Paulusstraat 8, 2630 Aartselaar, België Winibert.Segers@kuleuven.be Is translation evaluation a subjective, personal matter? Is evaluating translations the same as beer tasting or listening to a piece of music? Is the judgment determined by personal taste? We will try to answer those questions and to show how the subjectivity of the evaluation can be curtailed. The evaluation method that we use is the PIE method (Preselected Items Evaluation). PIE has five stages: • Preselection of items in the source text (before the test taking) • Determination of correct and incorrect solutions of the preselected items • Calculation of the scores of the candidates • Calculation of the difficulty degree (p-value) and the discriminatory power (d-index) of the preselected items • Calculation of the final scores of the candidates (This calculation is based on the preselected items with a good p-value and a good d-index.)